(English Version) ———————————————————-A musical leap from New York to the spirituality of the Arizona desert
By Ana María Díaz de Lewine and Alan Lewine

After playing Manhattan in July, Los Ruimonte traveled for two weeks to Arizona, in the southwest deserts of the United States. During the summer tour, Los Ruimonte performed in live for the people of the experimental city of Arcosanti in Arizona. This city was a revelation for the Spanish singer Ana María Ruimonte, “I feel like I’m on another planet.” While bassist/music director Alan Lewine had last been there in 1978 during the (in)famous music festival. “We were lucky our car didn’t burn that night when 100s of cars accidentally burned in the parking lot, in what it was known as the Car-B-Que.”

Designed by Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti is the beginning of an experimental utopian community under continuous construction since about 1970. It develops following Soleri’s principle of Arcology, where architectecture is guided by ecology. In a natural location, Arcosanti is designed to face the sun and reminds us of the red clay ground of the Great Canyon of Arizona. Cities today, full of noise, where individuality and consumerism prevail, full of pollution, and where cars are indispensable, led to this movement of living together closer to nature.

In August 2016, more than 40 years after its birth, Arcosanti remains active and alive, a spaceship on earth, a community of perhaps 100, many of them temporary volunteers working and learning there.

In a pop-up recital, spontaneously scheduled for a hot summer night in the open-air Vaults of Arcosanti, with the sky, the stars and a beautiful moon for a backdrop, the sweet voice of Ana María Ruimonte was heard, rhythmically accompanied by the chords and low notes of the bass of Alan Lewine. The night was colored by Sephardic music, boleros, and the famous theme from Star Trek, which seemed so appropriate at Arcosanti.

Outdoors, under the arch of “The Vaults”, designed by the architect Soleri and built by collaborators and volunteers who believed in the idea and the project, a natural echo emanated and the night evolved with magic and music to an appreciative group of reaidents. “Your voice echoed to the heavens this night” said Rob Jameson, the Technology Manager of Arcosanti. At the end of the night, a little scorpion, surely attracted by the music, was found by our feet. The people of Arcosanti live together and peacefully with the invertebrates and arthropods, animal species of the beautiful desert of Arizona.

Some days after that, in Tucson, Los Ruimonte performed their recital “Sephardic Treasures” at Temple Emanu-El, telling of the context and presenting songs preserved in the oral tradition from woman to woman, and from generation to the next generation, originating in the Jewish communities of Spain of the 15th Century and earlier, and collected by musicologists around the Mediterranean and in North Africa in the first half of the 20th Century. Magical songs with the real touch of life , meaningful for the listeners who like music and the stories of our ancestors.

And at the end of the tour, outdoors, at Monterey Court, Los Ruimonte performed the recital “Nine Centuries of Music in One Evening” together with some originals of Alan Lewine, and featuring Glendon Gross, on the trumpet and saxophone. It was for them a tender reunion as Glen played on Alan’s first album, recorded live at the Kimo Theater in Albuquerque in 1985, released originally in 1986, with some of the tunes remastered and rereleased on the CD “Owlsong: Sampler” in 2014 by Owlsong Productions.

Other musician at Monterey Court included the New Yorican bonguero, Eddie Rodríguez, now living in Tucson, and Tony Redhouse, Native American multi-percussion master from San Francisco, in a very unique collaboration. Tony told us “I use instruments and melodies of the American indigenous tradition, of my Navajo ancestors, to set together all the souls of this world, to give peace through meditation and music. This is different from the usual tendency to separate us into societies and races, where individuality prevails, I look for the opposite because I think that it is the sincere way to find peace, beauty and happiness.

I also bring my music and techniques to my work with addicts, helping them to get over their addiction, and in hospice with sick people and cancer patients, and I try to help them to calm their pains with meditation and my music, the music of my people of the desert of Arizona.”

He played and sang one of his originals on his Native American flute and drums, with Alan Lewine on bass.

Ana María closed the program saying: “these versions of the two songs by García Lorca, and of “Tres Morillas” –“The Moorish girls from Jaén”– and others in our three hour program tonight have been sublime and beautiful in this open-air setting. It has been magic and even startling. We thank our Friends in Tucson and the Spanish association of Artists, Performers and Interpreters, AIE, for their support in our tours and live recitals”.